Proton-M 1/96 bare metal edition [7]

First: thank you all for my now 10.000+ views! I am very honoured and happy with all your visits. Please leave a comment now and then, if you like. Would mean a lot to me. 

And now over to the business of the day.
Briz has been finished today. The chemo-fuelled upper stage is a small and quite easy one to make, however, the torus fuel tank parts on the top and bottom half need some attention when you build them.

After further detailing the lower torus with some aluminium tape strips, I made the central part of the stage. The outer ring shaped part of Briz is an external tank which can be jettisoned. The actual Briz stage is inside the ring. This ring shape was made by cutting out some cardboard rings in which the central doughnut-like opening is created. The hull goes around these rings. To get them snugly fitting I used some paper thickening inside the hull piece so it was tightly around the cardboard rings.
Also, the outside was detailed by carefully carving the textured lining.

more after the jump.

 

The ring structure keeping Briz nice and round. Thick cardboard was used.

The skin is on. The textured part actually is textured by carving all the lines.

More rings. On the right is the lower part that fits on top of the Proton 3rd stage. The torus piece goes in here.

Torus in place.

The upper torus was extended on the inside wall to be able to reach deeper down in the inside tube, and thus not leaving a hole in the structure. All the parts are edge glued, so the seams are as small as possible and there is an overall nice fit. The lower torus got its extra pressurizing tanks and then it was the inner part, the actual Briz stage itself.

Pressure tanks added (painted beads)

Upper torus part. Inside you might see the inner wall is extended to reach the edge of the rest of the wall.

Briz. One core engine and four vernier engines with a small pressure tank each.

In reality this one has some more latticework and less covered parts. The lower part also is a toroidal tank and in the frame on top there is a ball-shaped tank. all of this, when assembled, slides into the ring-shaped outer tank.

Briz fitting inside the ring shaped outer tank.

The rather busy business end of the completed Briz-M.

And it did. And it looks quite nice. Now on top there goes the payload. And over it goes the fairing. Now I still am pondering over the satellite I want to put inside. This would be the SS/L LS-1300 model, a commercial satellite casing that can be furnished to customers' wishes. Usually the model is used for communications. There is only one thing holding me back: there's no model of the LS-1300 available. I could try and make one myself from scratch, but I just cannot find information on its dimensions. Anyone here?